Pacer

My first session with Pacer ended with me bouncing off every barrier on the opening track like a pinball, grinning the whole time. That alone told me this game had something. Built by a studio that includes veterans from the Wipeout 3 team, Pacer is an anti-gravity combat racer set in 2075, where corporations race hoverships around international circuits at speeds ranging from 400 km/h all the way past 1000 km/h in Elite class. The core loop is straightforward: pick a craft, load out your weapons and performance mods in the garage, and go fast while trying not to get blown up by the person behind you. The garage is genuinely the game's best feature, and also the one most likely to cause first-timers to bounce off it. You get five base craft, each with a distinct feel, and from there you can tune performance across acceleration, top speed, handling, braking, and anti-gravity response, choosing between preset archetypes like High Speed, Agility, Defensive, and Drifter, or building your own custom setup. Weapons get two slots and two modifiers each, so you can go into a race running nano rockets with a spread modifier on the left and an electrical shockwave on the right, or swap everything out for mines and a flashbang if you prefer chaos. The depth is real. The caveat is that most parts are locked behind in-game credits earned through race placements, so early sessions feel a little thin until the garage opens up. It rewards patience rather than punishing newcomers immediately, but casual players who want full customisation on night one will be frustrated. On the track, the airbrake system is where the skill expression lives. Left and right brakes are on independent triggers, and learning to feather them through tight corners rather than just steering with the stick is what separates a mid-pack finisher from a front-runner. It takes real practice to get right, but when it clicks the feeling is exceptional. The eight race modes add genuine variety: Elimination keeps things tense by cutting the last-place racer, Flowmentum rewards momentum by accelerating your craft each lap, and Storm is essentially a battle royale mode where a contracting field punishes anyone who falls behind the boundary. Those three alone justify the single-player hours. The campaign mode sends you through 10 race teams across four speed classes, each with their own contract objectives, though the team narrative is thin and the career menus are clunky enough that reviewers flagged them consistently at launch. That criticism still stands. The weapon feedback is a legitimate weak point. Hitting someone with a gauss cannon should feel satisfying. It often does not. Weapons register, but the impact response is muted, and multiple critics at launch made the same observation: the visual and physical reaction from a hit is underwhelming compared to what the weapon names promise. The combat dressing adds tactical layer to loadout building, but in the moment it rarely matches the aggression the game sells itself on. As for online multiplayer, the matchmaking pool on PC has historically been thin, which is a real problem for a game where 10-player races are the stated peak experience. Custom lobbies with friends is the safer route if you want to guarantee full lobbies. Where Pacer genuinely earns its reputation is the soundtrack. Over 80 tracks featuring original work from CoLD SToRAGE (Tim Wright, the composer synonymous with classic Wipeout) alongside a licensed library of electronic artists is a serious offering. Turn the music up in the audio options because the default mix buries it, but once it is properly dialled in it makes the whole thing feel like a mid-90s futuristic club night at 900 km/h. For the specific kind of player who grew up with Wipeout HD, Redout, or Fast RMX and has been quietly looking for something to fill that gap, Pacer sits right in that lane.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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